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‘Beautiful Times – Philly Stop’

As we follow the “Beautiful Times” summer tour of X-O and Amanda Marie we find them in the city of brotherly love laying down layers of stencils and building out abandoned places with found object constructions. All tolled, the number of completed projects in this city made it the most prodigious of the tour so far.

First off they took a nice tour of Steve Powers ‘Love Letters’ murals that he did a couple of years ago with the Philadelphia Mural Project, and worked with that program to create their own project – something X-O refers to as an #emogarden called ‘High 5 Times’. Most likely that is about walking on stilts, we’re guessing.

As another project Amanda made some time to create a ‘camping’ scene in one of the many community gardens that dot the city of Philly, thanks to friends at HAHA x Paradigm, a magazine and gallery respectively. “Painting in the community garden was a good match for the ‘Beautiful Times’ vibe,” says X-O.

On their next investigation the two went on the hunt for more destitute architectural decay and hit the jackpot when X-O “found a beautiful demolition / construction site that had a super good sunken window temporarily covered in plywood,” he says excitedly. Did anyone mind that he created a new piece with various pieces of wood in the framed ventana? “The owners were happy to get a ‘lost object’ piece for the space,” he says, “and the neighbors are happy to have something more interesting than blank plywood to look at.”

Moving along, the two found “Tattooed Mom,” and they thought they were in a celestial graff palace. “If the paint store equals the candy store, then ‘Tattooed Mom’ equals the playground,” he exclaims the legendary graff writer / Street Artist hangout on South Street. “The whole upstairs is completely smashed with tags and pieces and a constantly shifting smorgasbord of aerosol madness,” says X-O.

Here Amanda Marie made some more urban ‘camping’ vignettes while X-O gave a Hanksy piece of his namesake actor some gender-reassignment surgery. “I dropped in a field of flowers behind him and updated his substantial forehead with the slogan ‘I Like Your Girlfriend’.”

“The last thing that got done before we split town was a big beautiful total street move from Amanda where she painted a few of her ‘Pretty Baby’ images on 5th street just a half block off of South Street … a really nice match of image with the hodge podge coloring of the empty building behind it,” X-O says.

“For both Amanda and me, one of the most impressive things about Philly were all of the walls that have been left exposed when adjacent buildings are torn down,” he says. It looks like the great experience with the mural program and these more organic adventures have gotten their wheels turning on even larger ideas for Philadelphia in the future.